 Adobe has created Photoshop Lightroom from the ground up, aiming it directly at professional photographers who need to process and catalog vast collections of images efficiently. At first, one might confuse the functions of Lightroom with Adobe Bridge. Indeed, the forthcoming Bridge CS3 looks a lot like Lightroom. Bridge, however, is best suited to managing a wide spectrum of digital assets across Adobe's CS applications.
For many photographers who need to manage their images, improve the quality of photos, process RAW images, perform batch operations (such as renaming) and print or present their work in slide shows or on the Web, Lightroom does it all elegantly. Filtering, special effects, montage and adding text, is not done here, but requires Photoshop. But many photographers—especially photojournalists—will find Lightroom the star in their workflow galaxy.
The program is divided into four modules: Library / Develop / Print / Web. The Library is where you organize your images via thumbnails. You can rate photos, add keyword tags, create collections, and reference or change metadata. You can also make side by side comparisons of images as in the screen shot below.
You can also magnify you images to check sharpness.
The Develop module is really Lightroom's darkroom. It's here that you tweak and repair your photos and fine-tune image temperature, tint, tone, brightness & contrast, etc. Operations are conveniently performed via slider bars, although you can also enter specific numeric values on the keyboard. As you dig deeper, new palettes appear for highly specialized refinements, i.e., curves, exposure control, highlights, histogram, lens correction, and even camera calibration. In fact, Lightroom offers every essential task and provides breathtaking control.
You can create a sophisticated slide show with Lightroom and control every aspect of its presentation.
The Print module lets you create a variety of contact sheets and offers handy templates.
Additional features include Live preview of HTML or Flash based web galleries; create HTML or Adobe Flash-based web galleries for online presentation with no programming necessary, and preview the results in Lightroom before publication. You can also save your web server information in Lightroom as an FTP preset, and then publish your Flash or HTML galleries with a single click. There's no more need for a separate FTP client application in your imaging workflow.
Once again, Adobe has seen the light and listened carefully to its user community. Photographers have something to celebrate with Lightroom...a fast, fluid, one-stop shop for image processing.
And—hey—this is only version 1.0!
www.adobe.com
 The new office suite is sleek, smooth, shiny, and powerful. Truth be told, we’ve been running the beta of Microsoft Office Professional 2007 for so long it’s difficult to think of the software as new. We quickly grew accustomed to its features and rely on them. With the final version running on our system, it's hard to imagine life without it. It was clear from our experience with the beta that the suite was going to be an Editors' Choice winner. We found no substantial bugs and had relatively few crashes. Outlook locked up a couple of times, but basically the workflow went smoothly. This is surely Microsoft's most reliable release to date.
The Professional package includes Access 2007, Accounting Express 2007, Excel 2007 Outlook 2007with Business Contact Manager, PowerPoint 2007, Publisher 2007, and Word 2007 We’ll focus here on Word since it’s the heart and soul of Office. Heck—is there anyone who doesn't use Word?
As you’ve undoubtedly heard, the interface has been overhauled and the applications share an elegant (Vista-like) look and feel. At the core of the new design is the Ribbon, a tool bar with commands organized into a set of tabs which appears at the top of the screen when you select one of the menu items: Home / Insert / Page Layout / References / Mailings / Review / View. So, for example, when you click on Page Layout, the most common tools become instantly accessible tabs (Themes, Colors, Fonts, Effects, Margins, Orientation, Size, Columns, Breaks, Line Numbers, Hyphenation, Watermark, Page Color, Page Borders, Indent, Spacing, etc.) No more digging through countless sub-menus. Everything is within reach. Even better, rolling your mouse over selections gives you a live preview of effects on the page. It’s really like magic.
In the partial screen shot below, hovering the mouse over the Theme Colors palette automatically changes the page color.
Drag the mouse to select some text and a mini tool bar (see below) appears so you can change the formatting on the fly.
Word has always had a plethora of powerful document creation tools, but finding them was challenging and using them even harder—often clunky. Not any more! The tools are smooth, intuitive, and fun. You'll actually enjoy designing documents in Word.
Word has always had a plethora of powerful document creation tools, but finding them was challenging and using them even harder—often clunky. Not any more! The tools are smooth, intuitive, and fun. You'll actually enjoy designing documents in Word. The program comes packed with a lot of templates, too, so non-artists can easily produce slick-looking professional docs. Best of all is the boost in productivity you'll experience. You can create and design documents much FASTER now.
One of our favorite new features is a little slider bar at the bottom of the screen that lets you interactively zoom-in on the page.
It's little features like this that make Word 2007 a real treat. Here's a quick list of a few more of our favorite features:
Quick Styles - quickly formatting text and tables throughout your document. • Document Themes - apply the same colors, fonts, and effects to your documents for a consistent look. • SmartArt - diagrams and a new charting engine help you add a professional look to documents. Built-in Blogging: Compose and publish blogs directly from within Word using the familiar Word interface to create your blog posts complete with pictures, rich formatting, spelling checker, and more. Publish your blogs from Word to many common blog services including Office SharePoint Server 2007, MSN® Spaces, Blogger, TypePad, Community Server, and more. • and Live word count keeps track of the number of words in your document as you type,
We've only scratched Word's surface. Bottom line: this is a must-have upgrade...a great leap forward in productivity.
CLICK HERE to test drive Office.
www.microsoft.com
Another essential, award-winning software application is Extensis Suitcase for Windows—which should've been built into the operating system. This is by far the best font management tool you can buy. It's an elegant solution for taking control of all the fonts on your system. Lets you easily create categories and collections of particular styles. So, for example, you can quickly access and compare all your grunge typefaces, your comic book specimens, your dingbats. (See the partial screen shot below.)
SUITCASE will boost your workflow by helping you find the right face for the job when you need it. Compare styles, activate or deactivate fonts on the fly. Fonts you're not using are safely stored by the program which also frees up system resources. You can back-up all your fonts and quickly spot damaged ones before they can cause your PC to crash.
No surprise that designers swear by Suitcase. And now so can you.
www.extensis.com
 dobe Acrobat 8 Professional—limber as ever—bounds into the workflow and again steals the show. Chaos becomes calm as deadlines are met. Collaboration flows like a stream. Communication is clear, visual, vivid, and everyone feels like a world-class acrobat.
This is the ultimate collaboration tool & document manager... powerful, flexible, and as ubiquitous as Britney Spears, if not as unpredictable. Of course we don't want surprises when it comes to our documents...we want speed & reliability and that's what Acrobat provides.
PDF (pretty darn fabulous).
What can you do with Acrobat 8? Or put it this way: what can't you do with Acrobat 8? Well, you can't bake bread. [EDITOR'S NOTE: We've just been informed that Adobe is working on that feature for a forthcoming update.] And speaking of User-Friendly, when you launch the new version you get this warm & fuzzy Acro-splash that's ready to hold your hand and walk you through any task (except baking bread).
The entire interface has been redesigned for easier access to all the tools and can be customized to suit your workflow.
The new Acrobat Connect feature lets you organize a web-based meeting with real-time screen-sharing / teleconferencing with just a few mouse-clicks. It's basically push-button invite / share-present / and brainstorm, without having to get dressed up and leave your desk—cool.
One of our favorite features is the ability to quickly combine multiple files (documents, images, whatever) into a single PDF package. The package can be emailed to collaborators or archived. In the screen shot below, note that we included an InDesign CS2 (.indd ) file which, in part, shows the enhanced integration with Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium. Indeed, Acrobat 8 Professional can now synchronize color management settings with other CS2 applications.
When combining files you can add entire folders (a great time-saver!) and even specify a subset of a document to include.
Once you've gathered your files you have the option of merging the files into a single, sequential PDF file, or creating a PDF Package which creates PDF wrapper for the separate files.
Acrobat 8 also includes enhanced Acrobat Reader support for filling out PDF forms and digitally signing PDF file. There's also automated corrections with Preflight, and JDF (Job Definition Format) workflow automation.
Hard to believe Adobe could make PDF creation any simpler (while still enhancing its creative & collaborative capacities) yet they've done it. The new design offers a symbiotic flow between each tool and guidance for using it. Features have been consolidated and logically layered for speedy document review.
If you thought Acrobat 7 was cool, 8 is even greater. It has snapped up our first Editors' Choice award of the new year.
www.adobe.com
|
